Vintage Road Test: 1967 Pontiac Firebird 400

It would not be right to celebrate the Camaro’s 50th anniversary without mentioning the other F-Body to come from GM in 1967. We went into the archives and found Eric Dahlquist’s initial road test of a Firebird 400 convertible in the Feb. 1967 issue of Hot Rod. In November 1966, he went to the GM Proving Grounds in Arizona to get his driving impressions of the car, which may explain why there are so many Christmas references in his story.

“Hark, I bring you glad tidings of great joy,” was Dahlquist’s opening line. “Super cars are out; super-super cars are in.” Later he talks of stealing “a 100-mph lap on the endless 5-mile banked oval and the Firebird was as solid as reindeer stock on Christmas Eve.”

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The “super-super cars” term referred to the big-cube mills hitting the market at that time, including 390 Mustangs and Cougars, 383 Barracudas, and “the 428 option like Carroll Shelby’s got right this minute on his 500 GTs, or that the Camaro would have anything else but a 396 (with Nickey dropping 427s in as fast as their hot little chain-falls would recycle).”

So Pontiac, said Dahlquist, “had the 400 (325 hp) engine in mind all along, and maybe the 428 if things get hairy. Even the so-called Ram Air package is there for the x-ing of the appropriate slot on the order form.”

With all those inches underhood, Dahlquist expected the Firebird to perform “like a shorter-fused GTO, and then some.” He had just tested a 350-powered Camaro that ran into the high 14s at the strip, but the porky little Pontiac, weighing in at 3,855 pounds, could only manage a best of 15.4 seconds at 92 mph. (The 3.08-geared rearend probably didn’t help, either.) “Give us the ‘air cooled’ 400 machine down around 3,400 pounds and we will take on the world.”

What did impress Dahlquist was how John DeLorean and his crew of engineers had righted many of the Camaro’s wrongs. “Small things. Like redesigning the Camaro’s frustrating radio knobs so that they are still safely contoured but easy to manipulate.” Big things too, like that “GTO-type” 400-inch powerplant, a “1-2-3 speed Turbo Hydramatic transmission behind it. And behind that the biggest fullsize GTO axle you ever saw.”

Early Camaro road tests lambasted Chevrolet for retaining the Nova’s monoleaf rear springs, which caused all kinds of axle-hop issues in models with bigger V-8s. “Well, the Firebird’s still got just two one-leafers back there,” Dahlquist pointed out, “but it hasn’t got two cents’ worth of wrap up because right below those two spring bands are a pair of the neatest traction bars. Maybe they shouldn’t even be called traction bars since they appear more like miniature funny car lift bars, yet pivot at both ends. But don’t go away, there is one more gimmick you drag guys will flip over. The Firebird’s traction arms incorporate an adjustable positive stop making it easy to adjust the degree of loading to suit strip conditions. You see, Mr. DeLorean really cares.”

Dahlquist predicted that super-super cars, like the Firebird, “will set 1967 down as a watershed in American automotivedom. How dare we be so prophetic? Easy, chum, if you’ve just driven down to General Motors Proving Ground in Mesa, Arizona, and seen the Firebird.

“‘The what bird?’

“F-i-r-e-b-i-r-d, friend. Remember that name. It’s one species of Pontiac you may regret ‘fouling’ around with.”